Diversity suffers in shadows

In 1984, then under a federal court order to appoint firefighter candidates in a ratio of one minority to every three whites, Worcester appointed 25 candidates, none of whom were a minority.

It took a lawsuit from the Boston Chapter of the NAACP to get the city to hire an additional eight candidates, all of whom were minorities. Nothing much seems to have changed in the city’s lack of political will to push diversity in the Fire Department over the years.

In 1988, the city successfully petitioned to have the consent decree removed, arguing that the Fire Department had met the required 10 percent minority membership. But once the consent decree was lifted, whatever momentum the city had gained in minority hiring soon abated.

Of 153 firefighters completing academy training between 1988, when the decree was dropped, and 2000, only 11 were minorities.

In 2000, the department had 39 minorities out of 444 members — 21 blacks, 16 Latinos and two American Indians (8.7 percent). Today, out of 407 firefighters, 36 are minorities (8 percent), of which 16 are Latino, 14 are black, and 6 are counted as other.

Boston, which was under a similar court order to hire one non-white for each new white firefighter, currently has minorities making up about 29 percent of that department’s membership. However, just like Worcester, the Boston hiring practices changed once the court order was lifted. According to a Boston Globe story last year, since the court order was lifted in Boston in 2003, 88 percent of the 313 new firefighters hired were white.

Fred Cowan, a fire inspector and the affirmative action officer for the Worcester Fire Department, was one of the 8 minority firefighters appointed after the 1984 lawsuit.

What went unnoticed by some at the time, according to Mr. Cowan, was that he and the other seven firefighters all had higher scores than the 25 white candidates initially hired.

That’s because the names of those 25 candidates were taken from the bottom of an old and expiring promotion list, while Cowan and the other minority candidates were at the top of the current promotional list for that time.

When he was appointed affirmative action officer in 1994 by former fire chief Dennis Budd, Cowan found out that as part of its argument to lift the consent decree in 1988, the city said it was about to hire an additional 12 minority firefighters. The city never did, he said.

He was influential in helping the city hire 11 minority candidates in 1994, off a PAR 10, an alternative promotional list that municipalities can use to increase diversity. It was the only time the PAR 10 list was used out of six firefighter recruit classes brought on between 1988 and 2000.

Mr. Cowan believes that relatively small numbers of minority candidates taking the exam continue to be a big factor in why the department’s membership has become stagnated, and over the years, with the help and encouragement of fire chiefs Gerard Dio and Budd, and District Fire Chief Walter Giard, Cowan has concentrated on increasing the pool of minority candidates taking and passing the Civil Service exam.

Councilor-at-Large Konstantina Lukes, in 2000, said the lack of diversity in the department was inexcusable.

“This is not just a question of fairness, it’s a question of legality,” she said at the time. “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”

Today, she acknowledged there has been a failure in leadership, but not only “from the top, but also from the bottom,” because the minority community has also failed to organize politically behind the issue.

She is right, because until the latter happens, Worcester politicians will continue to give diversity lip service, while acquiescing to business as usual behind closed doors.